


Long Memories of Winter

by TrinityVixen



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Awesome Peggy Carter, Back to the Future lied, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, F/M, Gen, M/M, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Protective Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Time Travel, Timey-Wimey, but Back to the Future II got it right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 15:07:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18662839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrinityVixen/pseuds/TrinityVixen
Summary: Some people think Steve abandoned Bucky. Nothing could be further from the truth.





	Long Memories of Winter

Navigating the past is tricky, even for a superhero—not just because there is no way for him to remember the complicated, intricate build-up of history and human circumstance behind every event and avoid messing with them. That’s too large for anyone to remember.  Worse, there is no way to know the ripple effect of every action. Either all of his actions happened—the past is fixed and he is part of it—or none of them did because even if one thing is different—one person he didn’t meet when he should have, one blade of grass missed while mowing the lawn, blinking instead of keeping his eyes open—he vaults into an alternate timeline and never sees the future he left again.

Steve makes peace with that the moment he kisses Peggy Carter for the first time since 1945 and decides to stay. The only way to be at peace, though, with all the suffering he knows he will have to witness and allow to happen, is to do just that: be a witness.

Because there’s one history he _is_ intimately familiar with. One that he scoured over and over again in the future because he hoped to make a difference there. It’s all or nothing, and some nights, he wants it to be nothing. As he sleeps beside Peggy, embarrassingly unfamiliar with whether or not he was ever meant to be here (and thus might have already changed everything he has ever known), he debates whether that means he can do more. Whether he can stop what he knows is going to happen to someone he loves just as much.

No. He has to try to get back to where it all started. So he is the witness.

***

In early March 1952, three people die of yellow fever in Hato Pintado, at the outskirts of Panama City. Fifty more die in April, an unusual spike for a disease that has been controlled with an effective vaccine for almost twenty years. The US Army, still a presence in the region, initiates a campaign of vaccination, digging into their own stocks of the vaccine which they keep on hand for US personnel working in the Panama Canal Zone. SHIELD agents, undercover, do most of the distribution. While they wait in line, or chat with the doctors giving the injections, locals offer information about their politics and politicians and the men who really pull the strings behind them.

Hydra’s network establishes a foothold in Central America that remains unbroken until 2014.

Steve is there before that, on February 29, 1952. It is his anniversary—the first and only he will ever miss. 1952 is exceptional for other reasons, not least of which is that it is the first test run of Arnim Zola’s pet project. It is also almost the only time that the Winter Solider will be utilized like a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer.

The need for a change in strategy becomes obvious when Steve watches Bucky flounder in his assignment for three days. Hydra has weaponized mosquitos—baby steps into the global assassination game they will engage in over and over—but they haven’t quite figured out how to utilize their weaponized amnesiac quite yet. Bucky smashes the vial of mosquitos in his metal hand one night. The next, he tosses it into the secondary target’s window; the vial does not break, so a sweeper team—prototypes of the Insight crew sixty years down the road—has to do clean up (the murders are blamed on gangs). The third night, Bucky accomplishes the simplest of tasks: he takes a stopper out of a vial, and a swarm of mosquitos escapes into a dense apartment complex.

Afterwards, Bucky walks mechanically, taking multiple turns every few minutes, until he is two miles away. He ends his perambulation when he picks, seemingly at random, a bench by a closed pharmacy, and waits for extraction. His face, twisted in frustration and pain for the past two nights, is blank. This is not an improvement. Steve hovers in the darkness, watches his best friend sit and wait as though inanimate for five hours. Right as the blackest of night fades to gray in the east, Bucky’s head falls forward, his chin hitting his chest.

He had fallen asleep with his eyes open.

It’s so familiar, it aches like déjà vu but with teeth. It was something he used to do when he was really drunk on those nights where he hadn’t been able to find feminine company and had warmed a bar stool next to an equally unlucky Steve. His mind and his past have been stolen from him, but this is muscle memory. Nothing else about the Winter Soldier resembles Bucky-as-was quite as much as this. Steve fails to stifle a whimper.

Bucky startles. His head whips up, eyes blinking rapidly.

“What! What happened?” Bucky slurs, still half-asleep. This, too, follows a pattern that not even Hydra could beat out of his friend. He runs a hand over his face, shakes his head, goggles blearily around him without concern or interest. Slowly, consciousness returns, Bucky squints at the signage in Spanish around him.

The extraction team arrives five minutes later. Five minutes more, and they might have lost their weapon entirely. Five minutes are all that stands between Bucky—and now, Steve—and the next sixty years of mayhem, torture, and murder. It’s a test. If he can survive those five minutes maybe he can survive the rest of it.

He survives, but he cries himself to sleep that night. Peggy retrieves him from the National Airport a week later. She bites her tongue to keep from asking questions, which, if he ever doubted her love for him, would prove it a hundred times over.

It never gets easier.

***

It’s harder to get away in December 1956. For one thing, he’s a father now. For another, Peggy is so busy expanding SHIELD into southeast Asia, she can barely help him keep his cover, let alone cover his tracks as he travels to South Africa.

Because she’s always been smarter than him, she works out the solution.

“Two birds, one stone, darling. Just be careful with him,” she says as she kisses the crown of their son’s head before pecking Steve lightly on his cheek.

That is how Grant Carter, Steve’s name since 1947, travels with his son, Michael James Carter, to visit Johannesburg. When they get off the plane, they are Aart and Sander Bakker, Dutch nationals on a holiday that unfortunately overlaps with the treason trial of over one hundred people with less Dutch-sounding names. Their only crime? Signing the Freedom Charter, a document that declared their country belonged to all who lived in it, not just the white folk.

The trial had been going on for two weeks before Steve arrived, the interruptions to it from protestors almost as long. Steve, cradling his son against his chest, sits in a second-floor café, overlooking the crowd on December 20th. He sits on the same side of the street outside the courthouse. Peggy told him to be careful, and he isn’t risking Michael to a stray bullet. This way, too, he does not have to see the faces of the men who would uphold Apartheid, the police pressing the black bodies away from the courthouse doors.

The rock flies from the crowd, right on schedule. More rocks follow because all it takes is a push. Only Steve sees the metal hand that throws that first stone. Bucky is on a roof across the street from him. He stays only long enough to watch the volley of gunfire when the police—over-armed and under-nerved—retaliate at the wrong targets. Hydra has learned their lesson: the Winter Solider is not to be left alone for long.

Steve cannot follow, situated close among the chaos with his precious burden. He knows Bucky goes right back to cold storage, mission—Hydra thinks—accomplished. They will not blame the weapon when the outcome is not as they wished. Or so Steve prays. He cannot be there either way, so he stays to admire how, even in crisis, some people rise above.

Nobody dies because a man who will never be called a hero, the deputy police commissioner, stops the barrage of bullets after the first volley. Medical help is dispatched and received quickly, as protestors remove the injured and the police do not interfere by attempting to detain people. Because humans are not perfect, the detentions are coming; hundreds will be arrested in the next forty-eight hours.

Steve waits long enough for the initial panic to subside, then seeks out the deputy commissioner to shake his hand. It’s a risk—time travel is all or nothing, his living mantra—but if he cannot stop bad things from happening, he can at least commend the good things. The man has the wrong idea about Steve’s praise, thinking Steve approves of the shooting, and Steve is on the end of a lecture about rising above man’s baser nature.

“This mob are frustrated. Doesn’t mean they have to die. We’re better than this,” says Deputy Commissioner Grobler before he turns back to minding the mayhem, Steve already dismissed from his thoughts.

Steve wonders if that’s what he sounded like, giving all those speeches. He has been told his words were eloquent and full of meaning. Well, sort of. Those hearing the speeches usually made sure to take the mickey out of him about them, eyes smiling even as their words were teasing. But he wonders if Deputy Commissioner Grobler, with his sing-song accent and gruff practicality, hasn’t gotten to the heart of it with less panache and more accuracy.

“We’re better than this,” he repeats to Michael as the boy burbles happily on the plane as they fly home.

***

Bucky’s hands don’t stay bloodless. No more strategic nudges, no more plausible deniability, no more shifting the responsibility for carnage onto human nature. Hydra has a super-soldier. Soldiers kill, that’s their job. All that they have to do is work with instincts already honed by war and turn them toward the slaughter of innocents.

In 1961, they do just that. The victims are teenagers at a late-night school dance in Kungälv. The chosen patsy is a child himself, mentally ill and easily persuaded with drink and an argument to pull a trigger. He is too unstable to provoke the response Hydra wants, so there is no guarantee his actions will provoke the largest police manhunt ever in western Sweden (a record unbroken as far in the future as Steve has ever been).

So the gunman is not alone when he barges into the dance. Fifteen shots are fired, seven people are hit, but the only person to die is gut-shot from a rifle of a caliber the unbalanced, drunk kid could never have shouldered. No one investigates too closely when there are witnesses who saw the crazy boy shooting up his school. One of the shots came from the roof across the street, moonlight glinting off the contrasting metals of a lethal barrel and equally deadly arm. The pattern is just like Johannesburg, only much, much worse. It is the only time Steve knows the Winter Soldier leaves a victim breathing. It could be Bucky shining through his programming to give the kid a shot at living. Or it could Hydra wanting him to inflict a grisly wound before death.

Steve isn’t sure which answer would be worse until he spends the next twelve hours assisting at the hospital. It takes almost a day for the wounded boy to die. After that, he knows.

No one connects this, the first time Bucky kills for Hydra directly, to the legends of the Winter Soldier, not until well after Hydra is revealed. It doesn’t go into SHIELD’s files, despite Peggy running the place and knowing full well the direction of Steve’s travels. He spent a year learning Swedish for this one day. This one most terrible day. The boy’s mother weeps quietly for her son and for the boy who took his life. She’s wrong, but Steve will take care of praying for the soul of the real killer.

And catching up on where he’ll pop up next.

***

No one dies in 1963 at the Winter Soldier’s hands, despite the assertions of conspiracy theorists in the future. Which is good because 1963 is when Steve almost loses Peggy to an enemy he cannot fight: a miscarriage.

Michael plays the man of the house, despite the fact that they’re all at the hospital. He distracts his sister, Amanda Natalie, with toys and reassures her that “mum is just resting.” He is only just turned eight, and already he frightens Steve with how determined and mature he is, the best and worst combination of both his parents. Peggy’s cousin, Alfred Carter, recently arrived from London and still jet-lagged, refused to leave Steve and the kids alone, but he is snoring in the corner while Michael keeps the ship aright.

Peggy will survive this, if he has his timelines right. If this is the way things were always meant to be. He thinks of the lawn mower and the blades of grass, tries to think if he cut it diagonally or in rows parallel to the house and if that matters as to whether his wife is going to die and leave him stranded in a timeline where he never again meets any of his friends in the future.

It is a long week before she recovers well enough to leave the hospital. Then several long months of further complications that serve to undermine Steve’s confidence about the future. They deal with her having heavy spotting between her monthlies. Cramps that have her out from work and more than a few SHIELD folk angling to replace her as director. An infection that she powers through despite antibiotics making her sicker than when she was pregnant. All the while, with every new interruption in the otherwise smooth life he had been managing, Steve wonders if he has diverged from the path he was meant to walk without knowing which event was responsible.

The Winter Soldier sleeps through Steve’s worst year. It is the only way Steve keeps from going mad.

***

1964 is a different story.

The politics are complicated, but so they always are. Steve struggles to understand them anyway. The best he can do is acknowledge that an outsider, a man without a proper place in history, much less ethnic ties that exist from time immemorial, will never wholly understand the politics in Africa, the Republic of Congo least of all.

Where he can, he looks for similarities to what he knows. For a long time, the Congo was spared the fate of the more costal areas of Africa—its terrain less governable, its ivory a suitable commodity to trade in place of slaves. In a way, it reminds Steve of Wakanda, with its history of fabulous wealth and kings with great ambition and prowess in battle. Unlike Wakanda, it eventually fell to colonialist “progress,” to Belgian rule that saw the Baluba people, the descendants of royalty, chained to mining pits.

In other words, the perfect spot for Hydra to stir up trouble because trouble already stirred itself there. In May 1964, the Congo is one more battlefield for the West and East to carve apart, and the Cold War inflammation spilling over along ethnic lines. As far as Steve can tell, Hydra is on both sides of the conflict. The goal _is_ conflict, enough to justify or forgive whatever comes after.

A politician with a short temper, a long history in various legislative bodies, and a fantastic rapport with the people stands in the way. Jason Sendwe aggravates as much tension as he advocates peace, but at the center of his agitation are ideals Steve finds compelling. Sendwe reminds him of himself, back when he was younger, albeit less sad and more angry. His first goal is to protect his people. Independence, freedom are lofty goals, but the people come first.

A white man in deepest Africa stands out like a scar. For the first time, Steve is known to one of the Winter Soldier’s victims before his demise when Sendwe finally confronts the westerner who has been at the trailing edge of his public appearances. Steve tells him he is naïve to ignore the international politics in his country in favor of the local. Newly confident in his position as President thanks to the intervention of the army, Sendwe laughs at this. He has big plans, but he forgets that he has enemies, including in his own government, within the army that re-instated him, and among the rebels that oppose him.

When the trigger is pulled in June 1964, no one takes the blame and everyone points fingers. Journalists, littered through the country like the all-too-prevalent firearms, report different stories. One tells the tale of Sendwe and an American missionary being shot by Simba rebels after his police escort fled. This is the closest to the truth, though Steve is chagrined that his French accent is so poor the journalist could guess at his background. The writer also gets his cover story wrong; he was in country as an ivory trader. Otherwise, it’s a fair enough tale of murder and violence for the sake of murder and violence

What goes unreported is the Simba rebels are themselves benefitted from Sendwe’s death only thanks to circumstance. The police escort is one car only; it falls back because of a flat tire. Shot out, as it happens, just like the one that nearly topples him and Sendwe off the road a few miles later. Steve takes the wheel, yanks it into the skid where Sendwe, in the driver’s seat, would have turned away, sending them careening into a ditch. They come to a stop sideways in the road, breathing heavily.

Sendwe dies today, but until this moment, it never occurred to him that he might be a bystander casualty of one of these missions. Peggy’s future is certain, and now that they have the only two children they will ever have—if he has those goddamned timelines right—he is extraneous to that future. The Winter Soldier will finish his mission by killing Sendwe, but what about Steve? He has to die, as much because he is a witness as anything else.

The shot comes as Sendwe laughs, whooping with joy over the avoided car wreck. The bullet comes out through his open mouth, a bloody punctuation to his last guffaw. Steve dives for the floor, knowing it is futile; if the shot is coming, the roofless jeep offers no protection. The best he can do is cover his head and hope that the next shot misses.

The next shot never comes, but the Simba do. Steve buys his freedom from them with a lie that only works because half of it is true. The lie: he lured Sendwe here into a trap in return for better access to ivory, which was promised to him by one of the Simba leaders. The truth: he lured no one anywhere, he just didn’t stop the poor man when he drove off in the direction of his destiny. Steve tastes bile in his throat as he walks away from fractious rebels who celebrate victory in the slaughter of their enemy.

He never gets that close to one of Bucky’s targets again.

***

The story is the same for the next forty-five years. The names change, the details rarely do, and the outcome never does.

Steve sees more blood and terror in that time, up close and personal, than he can remember seeing in the entirety of the war. He puts stamps on several passports, none of which are his own, and learns enough of several languages to get by when he needs to. He is covered in blood more than once. He hates himself for witnessing carnage and doing nothing about it until he comes home to Peggy and Michael and Amanda and reminds himself that everything he endures, he does for them. For them to have the world that eventually ends up saved. He cannot risk their future. One change, and maybe Thanos wins. Maybe none of them make it past 2018, much less 2023. His kids will be in their sixties when that happens. He still won’t risk it.

He thinks of Tony at those times, and how the smartest man on Earth turned away from the mystery of time travel and the glory of saving the world because of the risk to his daughter. If only Steve could go back—or forward, goddamned time travel—and tell him.

He gets it now.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, he has about two hours alone with Bucky. Stolen moments where Steve is the only one to see him when all eyes are turned to the violence he has unleashed. Once, in Marseille, in 1983, he walked behind Bucky for almost a mile after he had detonated a bomb at the Palais de Congrès. An international fair at the convention center was the target. Steve knew to stay well away from certain pavilions, but still his ears ring when the explosions and panic erupt.

Among the people fleeing is a familiar face; just like them, Bucky is bleeding from the ears because, unlike Steve, he didn’t know how to far to go for minimum safe distance. He is deafened from the explosion, or Steve would never dare follow him as he stumbles away in the direction of the river.

Bucky’s French is rustier than Steve’s, and he asks for help from multiple people as he limps away. Steve wants to be the shoulder for him to lean on, but he came too close once to being spotted. Bucky cannot see his face, even weathered, wrinkled, and bearded as it is now. Instead, Steve comes as close as he can when a woman finally stops to assist Bucky. Swearing in French with a thick Algerian accent, she dabs at the blood dried on his neck. Bucky cannot hear her, but he reads her expression and lips well enough to mumble thanks. He keeps shooting nervous glances over his shoulder, forcing Steve to retreat out of sight beyond a magazine stand.

This saves his life. The extraction team executes the woman helping Bucky and yanks him into a van no more than sixty seconds later. He is screaming and openly weeping as he fights them. It is the only time in the entirety of this career playing watcher that Steve has seen him fight the agents that retrieve him. Whenever he has witnessed Bucky retreating, not often given the chaos left in his wake, Steve has ached to see his friend go as gently as a lamb to his captors. Some part of him must know the torture that awaits, but he is powerless to stop it. The conditioning is too engrained.

Not so in Marseilles. The bombing must have scrambled more than his hearing. Or maybe he took more time arranging the bomb; in the future, Bucky will tell him that the longer he stayed out of cold storage, the more his conditioning would fade. Hence the need for subconscious commands that undermined his will. Hydra wanted a killing machine that was adaptable, which meant allowing for some improvisation but also a failsafe that could bring him to heel.

Bucky does not even seem aware of the metal arm when he punches one of the Insight crew in the face. The man goes down harder that the Good Samaritan and stops breathing just as quickly. Bucky flees, sprinting from the van as two men follow after him, shouting while a third trails them, rapidly turning pages in a book. Bucky makes it fifty feet, to within ten feet of where Steve is standing. Their eyes meet. Bucky opens his mouth to ask for—something.

Words, garbled Russian fill the space between them, and, instantly, Bucky freezes. The will and instinct to fight keep his shoulders tense and his feet planted, but he does not protest when two of the men come up to him and latch onto his arms. After a beat, Bucky turns, under instructions Steve does not hear. He and the other three men walk back towards the van. Bucky bends, retrieves the woman’s body and tosses it into the van like a sack of potatoes. One of her shoes is left behind on the pavement. No kinder are his actions towards the dead Insight lackey. He folds the man’s leg backwards at the knee, hops into the van and shuts the door himself.

Everyone else is distracted by the bombing. Murder and kidnapping in broad daylight goes unnoticed and unpunished. The woman’s name is Agnes Debrosse. She leaves behind a son and a daughter. More guilt is loaded onto Steve’s conscience, but what haunts his dreams for the next decade are Bucky’s eyes, pleading with him for rescue.

If it had happened in 1952, the future would have been doomed. Because there is no way he would have let them take Bucky. Thirty years later, he has been long conditioned by fear and the need to protect his family not to interfere. That makes his failure to act worse, not better. He has become the man who doesn’t act when he sees a situation going south. Another thing he wishes he could tell Tony and knows he never will.

***

Howard and Maria’s deaths break him. Peggy, too.

SHIELD isn’t the kind of organization where people socialize much, certainly not with their significant others. Exceptions could be made for some at the top, and no one is more at the top than Peggy or Howard. But they don’t. They two of them socialize and, for all Steve knows, gossip and gripe about their respective spouses. Steve encourages it and declines to join them. After so many years, he doubts Howard would recognize him—he barely recognizes Howard as an older man—but he won’t chance it. He has grandchildren now. They need a future he can be certain of, and the only way he knows to secure it is to avoid the man entirely.

Him _and_ his son.

Peggy thinks Anthony Stark—she always calls him Anthony, and from what Steve can tell, Tony _hates_ that—thinks too much of himself. Steve knows she’s right and wrong, and smiles, knowingly, when his wife rants about Howard wanting to involve the boy in SHIELD business. Just because “he knows a little about engines.” Steve files that away in his mental list of things he wishes he could tell Tony, likes to imagine his spluttering or spit-fire response to such condescension.

He has lists and imaginary reactions for each of the Avengers, but, after Bucky and Sam, Natasha and Tony’s are the longest. Despite her rants, Peggy is fond of the boy, and he suspects Tony is wild about her ability to keep pace with his wit.

Which is why Christmas 1991 hits so hard.

They are at Amanda’s home, with her three kids, and the house is noisier than Steve remembers it ever being when his children were little. Amanda scoffs at that, accuses him of forgetting. He is older now, it’s possible he’s losing his edge. But he doesn’t think so. Things are just louder, now. He remembers feeling that way in 2011 when he first woke up after being rescued from the arctic ice.

Christmas is two days away when Steve “remembers” he left the stove on at home. Home is Silver Spring, Maryland, an easy commute to the Triskelion for Peggy and not so far from Amanda’s home in Lutherville that the excuse is ridiculous. He can be back in under two hours without raising suspicion. Complaints are made, offers to ride along refused. _Your father can be so stubborn, the stove is fine. If the whole place goes up in ball of fire, so be it. It will finally get all his papers out of the car park._ The mirth over his departure flows long from Peggy. She has ample training in making his excuses, and there may be more than a little truth to some of it anyway.

He goes in the opposite direction he announces to his family, ditches the family car for a nondescript black sedan that he bought with cash from a ne’er-do-well outside of Baltimore on their way up to Lutherville. He finds a stretch of road he first saw on a grimy, aged videocassette in 2016 and that he has, ever since, visited at least once a year. He knows every street lamp and tree. He drives past and parks the car two miles away. He hikes back, hitching his shoulders up against the December cold.

He changes out of his “Grandpa drag,” as his daughter calls his habitual button-down shirt and khaki slacks with high-waisted belt, in favor of a mottled black and gray pair of trousers and matching shirt. He pulls a balaclava over his gray hair, dons matching black-and-gray gloves. The Grandpa suit goes into a bag, and he buries the bag under leaves.

The road passes by a factory farm. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a bunch of psychotics who wouldn’t know animal welfare if it bit them in the face (or so his son says), have been known to snip the fences at farms lately and go in and document farming practices they deem immoral or, well, unethical. It hasn’t happened here that Steve knows of, but clearly no one is taking any chances with eco-terrorists. There are cameras along the fence that surrounds the farm, cameras that Steve takes pains to avoid by walking in the woods alongside the road as far as he can without losing sight of it.

When he spots the gnarled oak tree next to a sign about the penalties of trespassing and one of the cameras, he veers back toward the road, but keeps himself in shadows as he burrows into the leaf litter next to a maple tree on his side. Disguised as the forest floor, he waits.

The time passes interminably slow. His fib about the stove gave him time to drive, walk and change, and still arrive at the first hour of nightfall, just in case. Because one of the few details he’s forgotten over the decades is the time when it happens. He knows the date, he knows that it happens at night, but not the when.

His watch reads 11:15 pm when his ears first detect the rumble of a motorcycle in the distance. The rest is history that he watches unfold in slow motion. Just like in Congo, the tires are shot out; unlike Congo, Howard cannot keep the car on the road. The oak tree takes a hit, but not as bad at the one Howard does as his face crumples under Bucky’s fist mere minutes later.

What Steve remembers later plays out of order in his nightmares. Maria whimpering Howard’s name before Bucky cuts off her windpipe. The contrast of Howard’s white hair and red, red blood, both tinged orange in the halo of the streetlight. Bucky shooting out the camera and taking something from the trunk. The crunch of the hood hitting the oak tree, and the shower of bark and shattering of glass. Howard’s last words being, “Sargent Barnes?”

Steve pukes his guts out as soon as Bucky’s motorcycle taillights are no longer visible. The camera ahead of him is gone, so, once he’s done voiding eggnog and sugar cookies, he stumbles out of the darkness towards the car, careless about leaving evidence. If this all goes as it is supposed to, no one ever suspects foul play. No one will look for footprints or anything of the sort.

He crouches down next to Howard, shaking and drooling as if he might vomit again. But he has to touch Howard, to believe this is real—if his whole weird, occasionally wonderful but currently awful life is real. It is as real as the warmth fast fading from Howard’s ruined face, which Steve purposefully memorizes. He let this happen, as he has every death since the beginning. The man who helped make him what he is, and Steve let him die. He let Bucky kill him. He failed both of them. Even if he thinks he has a good reason, if there is a Hell, he will burn there.

Maria is no less a tragic loss, even if he didn’t know her. Her face is serene where Howard’s is destroyed, though her neck is grotesquely angled. How anyone could think she died in the crash with what already look like bruises forming around her windpipe is beyond him. And Howard will be blamed for it. And Tony will hate him for it. And there will be so much pain in the future because of it.

Some of that pain comes sooner. Steve makes the excuse to stay over at home rather than head out in the dark again and then spends a sleepless night wishing he hadn’t. Wishing he could concoct any excuse at all to head to his family and steep himself in the comfort of their presence. He drinks an entire bottle of scotch that does nothing to him, watches the sun come up from his own living room. A sunrise Howard and Maria will never see.

The call comes to the house first at seven-thirty in the morning. A man calling him “sir” does not give his name, only asks for his wife. He gives him the number for Lutherville and forgets to pretend to be curious or suspicious. Maybe the agent will believe he is used to strange calls for his wife at odd hours on Christmas Eve. The anonymous agent thanks him for his time and hangs up.

Steve weighs his options. Even if he got in the car right away, he wouldn’t reach Peggy before the news does. And if he leaves, she won’t be able to reach him to ask why he never told her about Howard. Because she’ll know. She always does.

He waits for the call for three hours. She’s mad enough to use his real name when he picks up.

“How could you, _Steve_?”

Yet another way time travel is boggling: no one has called him “Steve” for longer than anyone ever did. Her tone wounds him. His older—actually younger—more self-righteous self might have made a speech or chastised her for caring when it was someone she knew and not all the other people she must know about by now.

All he can say is, “I’m so sorry, Peggy.”

She is silent on the other end, not at a loss for words, only thinking. Finally, she says, “I have to go to DC tonight. You had better come back. I’ll be gone in the next two hours. You don’t need to be here before then.”

 _I don’t want to look at you_. They’ve been married long enough he knows the lingo.

Only when she hangs up on him does he start crying. He cries for Bucky. He cries for Howard. He cries for Tony. The first is already back to sleep, being made to forget everything that had happened. The second is dead for no reason other than he got in Hydra’s way, like so many before him. The latter won’t understand that his father was a decent man and a victim until too many years of resentment entangled with grief make such a revelation anything other than poisonous.

He does not grieve for himself, the witness. This is the bargain he struck. If the future is proceeding exactly as he remembers it, and so far, it seems to, then he accepted the consequences a long time ago. Peggy and their beautiful family at the cost of so many lives.

He takes his time because he needs to clean his face and because Peggy does not want to see him. He needs to be strong for his family. None of them know Howard, but they know of him. The loss will be less personal and more impressionable, although he suspects Peggy’s absence will cast the most somber pall over Yule festivities. Someone has to be there to help them soldier on.

Once, a man had bid him not to be a perfect soldier but a good man. He wonders if he can be either after last night.

Peggy returns on Christmas morning to see the grandkids open their gifts from Santa; Peggy stares ahead, unseeing, smiling automatically. Their grandkids don’t notice, but their daughter does. Amanda casts furtive glances at her mother all the while, catches Steve’s eye once or twice. He braces himself for her interrogation; when it comes to wheedling secrets out people, she’s second only to her mother in ability. Throughout preparations for dinner, she is at his elbow, raising an eyebrow and nodding her head at Peggy. Steve volunteers to do the dishes to escape right after the meal.

Amanda comes with him.

“It’s bad,” she says.

“It’s always bad when someone you were close with dies.”

Amanda shakes her head, her lips tremble. “Dad, you should have seen her face. I thought—I thought something might have happened to you _._ Or Michael or Barbara or the kids.”

Michael is not with his family this year. He is in the Peru with Doctors Without Borders, dealing with the aftermath of a cholera outbreak. His wife took their kids to her family for the holiday in his absence. Steve’s stomach, already twisted, sinks to the floor at the thought. He doesn’t actually know Michael will be all right any more than he knows he will. Beyond the certainty of Michael and Amanda themselves, all else was gift, one that might be snatched away at any moment.  

Peggy clears her throat from the hallway. Steve looks away, finishes drying his plate. More certain of her welcome than he, Amanda throws herself at Peggy and squeezes her.

“I know you can’t tell me,” she says. “But I’m here if you need.”

Peggy seeks out his gaze over Amanda’s shoulder. Her expression shifts like quicksilver between frustration, anger, pain, and affection, the latter he assumes is for their daughter. Peggy presses a kiss to Amanda’s temple, and she extracts herself from her daughter’s arms only to insert herself into Steve’s. He cups the back of her head and draws her face against his neck. She settles there, breathing deep.

He makes the excuses this time. He tells Amanda he loves her, stays long enough to hear her say it back, then walks Peggy to the spare room where they’re staying. Inside the bedroom, Steve brushes his teeth with Peggy, changes into pajamas with Peggy, and climbs into bed beside Peggy, all without a word.

When he rolls over to turn off the light, she surprises him by straddling his hips when he rolls back. Still silent, she kisses him, strips him of his flannel sleepwear, and lets him do the same for her. They make love in such a frenzy, Steve’s head spins long after Peggy collapses against his chest.

He opens his mouth, and she lays a finger over it.

“For her,” she answers the question he does not get to ask. “You did it for them.”

 _I did it for you_.

He thinks she sleeps, but half an hour later, she whispers, “Can you tell me who did it?”

“Will you leave it alone if I do?” Not investigate, he means.

She sighs. No, of course not. She would not be who she is if she could just stop. And it wouldn’t stop with Bucky’s name. She would scorch the Earth until Hydra had nowhere to hide. He can’t tell her, and she is smart and self-aware enough not to pry.

Instead, she asks, “How much longer?”

“Two-thousand and nine.”

Peggy mewls, a mournful, choked noise as she buries her face against his neck. “Is it—is that when you…”

“No,” he says quickly. “I’m going to be okay, Peggy.”

He doesn’t know that. He may never see the last mission Hydra sends Bucky on before they try to enact their master plan. It isn’t the time to mention that--nothing he could do about it anyway. The past is fixed.

“How,” she quavers, “How have you done this for forty years, love?”

He sighs, rests his cheek against the crown of her head. “I had you.”

“Why? Why have you done this to yourself?”

That is the better question. “Because someone had to.”

_I’d do it again for you._

He feels Peggy’s lips quirk up to one side in a smirk “You’re a stupid, noble bastard, Steven Rogers.”

Hearing his full name stings less this time, less and less as the harsh tongue that spoke it seeks out his own inside his mouth when she kisses him. They’re not fixed, not by a longshot, but when Peggy holds him against her body, plays with his hair and tells him they’ll get through this together, he believes her.

***

Farhad Jahandar is the last man to die at the Winter Soldier’s hands until he and his masters are unmasked in 2014.

Age catches up to Steve about the same time as it does Peggy, and it seems to happen all at once. There are aches and pains aplenty before, but it’s the wear and tear on his mind and soul that slows him up as the millennium turns over. Peggy is still Director of SHIELD in 2001. The Council does not fire her for not preventing the 9-11 attacks, but Peggy knows they’re tooling up for it. On the advice of Alexander Pierce, she retires in favor of his chosen successor. Steve lets her know what he thinks of Pierce and would be all for hanging the man’s advice, but the choice is sound and Peggy trusts her replacement will do a good job.

Nick Fury is only SHIELD Director for less than ten years before Steve wakes up from the ice, which boggles his mind; that man acted like he’d been born at the helm. In January 2002, the Fury that takes over for Peggy actually stops by their house to speak with her. Only in private will he express doubt. Peggy gives him the best advice she has: own it, but never let it show. That fits more like what Steve remembers. He even greets Fury when the man comes over now and again, trusting that his chronological age—somewhere between eighty and eighty-five—protects him from being recognized and keeps those pesky timelines where they’re meant to be. It must. Peggy mentions the Avengers Initiative with a raised eyebrow to him after one visit. He grins and waggles an eyebrow. She calls him a nerd. They move on.

Retirement goes slowly at first. Peggy is sharp as a whip crack keeping Fury afloat for the first year. The next, they spend traveling to places they both have never been, the better to avoid their respective ghosts. They spend a week with one of their children each month. There are mundane events enough to fill all their days when there are somehow ten grandchildren and five-and-counting great-grandchildren to spoil, to say nothing of nieces, nephews and grand-nieces and -nephews. He meets Sharon for the first time in 2003. Thankfully, he is too old and gray, too safely out of her zone of recognition for her to spend any amount of time in his company—not when Aunt Peggy is willing to encourage a seventeen-year-old into a career her mother openly protests. (Alfred’s children are all hippies well past the death of the movement.) Aunt Peggy sets her straight on the path that will lead her to meet Steve in the future. Nearly sixty years, and he seems to be keeping everything right.

Including what happens to Natasha outside of Odessa.

At this point, the Winter Soldier is the most efficient killing machine that science has to offer. Knowing what he does about the Red Room and the trainees—like Natasha—who come out of it, that is saying something. It never gets easier to see the victims, hear their screams and pleas for mercy, but knowing of them through research and _knowing_ them are completely different animals.

The death of the scientist is secondary. Later, he will regret caring less about the man whose brains splatter on rocks than the woman who survives, albeit aerated through her midsection. The wound is terrific, debilitating; the exit hole on her other side must be an inch and a half, much worse than the scar she will show him in 2014 would indicate. She checks Dr. Jahandar’s pulse, just to be sure, then starts tearing apart his jacket to pack her wound.

Bucky is gone as soon as the scientist is dead, ambling off into the maze of streets of the old city. Steve doesn’t try to follow. The future has caught them up. The next time they meet, some version of Steve will meet him directly, will have the confrontation Steve has avoided for more than half a century.

Today, however, is promised to no one. He has done his job and seen this through to the end, so he is free to focus on a friend he thinks he can safely meet and help without ruining what he has spent decades preserving. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t take precautions. Steve has on a fuzzy hat and a scarf over the lower half of his face, and his truck has enough detritus in it to convince the spy he literally brings in from the cold that he is a harmless nobody. Natasha bleeds all over the passenger seat as she, white-faced and thin-lipped, directs him in flawless Ukrainian. She even thanks him as he drops her off in front of what he hopes is a SHIELD safehouse with suitable medical facilities.

“Bud’laska,” he replies as she tumbles out of the cab. “Do pobachennya.”

Even wounded, she is alert enough to keep her back to the wall and face him as he drives away. He can feel her eyes on him the whole time. He might have done better to grunt rather that to fumble in his piss-poor Ukrainian, but this will likely be the last time he ever sees her. This tough, resilient, fantastic friend saved the universe at the cost of her own life. Last time, he didn’t get to say goodbye, and he won’t make that mistake twice. He hopes time is irrelevant wherever she and Tony are and that they’re laughing at this, as this self-righteous crusade and his fastidious adherence to it.

He’ll probably get to wherever they are soon. He half hopes it will be well before 2014. In 2009, Peggy is already forgetting things. She is still brilliant and witty, but he alone knows what is in store within the next five years. He has fought for this life, tooth and nail, at the cost of his soul, and he’ll keep fighting no matter how she fades. And it’s nothing awful, nothing as bad as the pained grimace on Natasha’s face when she is shot. Nothing like Bucky’s face the few times the real man had peered out from under the torture and conditioning and misery in an expression or a tic that took Steve back to being twenty years old in Brooklyn with his best friend. Nothing like the dead that stretch from Steve striding up Peggy’s front steps in 1947 and now.

Peggy is only forgetful, in 2009.

***

From there, however, the drift is noticeable. Captain America resurfaces to the rest of the world in 2012 when he and a collective of other heroes rescue Earth from space aliens. Steve watches with great amusement as people speculate about why, in the year 2012, a man wants to dress like the jingoistic hero of black and white films from World War II. It takes about two weeks before enough monkeys at enough internet typewriters come up with enough side-by-side comparisons to prove that the man in 2012 doesn’t just wear the suit of Captain America, he also wears his face.

Peggy notices and exclaims that he looks so young on television, nothing like the old fart she lives with. They still live together, at home, but that will likely have to change soon. Amanda has offered her home, but she has kids and grandkids of her own to fret over and clean up after. Steve refuses to push his daughter into the “Sandwich Generation” along with the rest of her peers—forcing her to care for parents and kids at the same time. He can handle Peggy. He is still stronger than men a quarter of his age, though his body has slimmed some with time.

The real problem is handling _his family_. Peggy has never circulated photos of him, and all the ones he or his kids have taken remain with them. Most of the ones where he is incriminatingly himself are on media old enough that it has escaped the upgrade to digital archiving. Or, rather, it might have, if not for his daughter-in-law deciding that photo albums on the computer would be a good way to retrain her mother-in-law when she forgets names. Barbara has a grand plan to match older photos, which Peggy remembers, with newer ones, in hopes of sparking more reliable recognition when they all come over.

That is how his daughter-in-law ends up in his living room ten days after the Battle of New York, shivering after being drenched by the downpour she ran through.

“Do they _know_?” She demands.

Seeing as she is the first and only person to put it together in sixty-five years, Steve pays her the compliment of not denying the underlying accusation.

“Only Peggy,” he says.

Barbara spends twenty minutes trying to wrap her head around time travel, thanks in part to its intricate and unknowable nature and Steve’s poor explanations before giving up. It’s irrelevant to her purpose in confronting him. As abrasive as she can be, she makes a great match for his son.

“You will tell them,” she demands.

He caves. They have come this far. The future is still at stake, but it’s past time he leveled with his children. It’s only a few weeks later when he can get both Michael and Barbara and Amanda and her new girlfriend (Callie, soon to be wife, they hope) over, that Steve regrets not doing this when Peggy was well. He could have used the assist. She gets distracted before the conversation even properly begins and drops the bomb before Steve can target it a little better.

The discussion has focused on Tony Stark going missing, a segue to what Steve really wants to tell his children and their significant others. His mansion was exploded after he goaded a terrorist on live television.

“So like his father,” Peggy chimes in. “Howard never met a bit of attention he could refuse. You remember, don’t you? Los Angeles was crawling with reporters, and he would have lipstick on his collar and no sleep, and he would still pose for pictures.”

Before Steve can correct her, she does it herself. “Oh, no, wait, you don’t remember that. That was after you were dead. You wouldn’t have known Howard then.”

Barbara turns purple trying not to squeal, and Steve isn’t sure his color is much different. Michael, Amanda, and Callie smile vaguely at her. Steve loves them all, but he hates those smiles, the ones that indulge mother in her delusion. He hates more than he knows they’re fighting tears every time Peggy fades out on them.

“You’re right,” Steve says, salvaging what he can from this. “I died in 1945. You didn’t go west with Howard and SHIELD until, what, 1946?”

“Mm, something like that,” Peggy nods.

“What was that, Dad? You _died_ in 1945?” Barbara does not quite elbow her husband, but it is enough of a shove that Michael jumps.

“Barb, what in the goddamn—”

“Language, young man,” Peggy chides, winking at Steve. He should _never_ have told her that story. Of course, of all the things she would remember, it is a joke that went too far and that _has not happened yet_.

“Oh please,” Amanda says, rolling her eyes. “Mum, you cuss most of any of us.” Waving her mother off, she explains to Barbara, “Dad was listed as K-I-A in World War II when his squad—”

“Regiment,” he interrupts.

“Regiment, whatever, got captured. He actually was liberated by Captain America.”

Those are the magic words, the ones he’s been running from as long as he’s been running from Steven Rogers. Amanda’s eyes widen to show whites all around.

“Holy shit, Dad, did you _know_ Captain America?” She shakes her head, confused. “No, I mean, do you _know_ him? Is that him? The guy on TV? Really?”

Michael brightens at this. His expression had been clouded, but now that he is following his sister’s lead, he smiles. Undoubtedly, he assumed this conversation was going to be about Peggy. If it’s just about his father confirming an old war buddy is, however improbably, back from the grave and a superhero, this is much less dire news.

“It is him,” Steve confirms. “Or,” he pauses for dramatic effect, trying not to enjoy Barbara’s stifled groan, “I should say: he is me.”

His children are the brightest minds he has ever had the pleasure to shape, and they are still clueless for a long, silent minute while they try to figure out what kind of joke he is pulling. Or worse, if he is as deluded as his wife.

Callie is the first to react. “Oh, you know? Now that you say it? I kinda see the resemblance.”

Michael, several beats behind her, asks, “Resemblance to whom?”

“Captain America,” Callie says.

Michael jerks his head back on his neck, as though offended. He scans Steve up and down, skeptically analyzing his familiar face and not putting the pieces together.

“What, he looks like him?”

“He _is_ him!” Barbara shrieks, unable to hold back any longer.

Now three sets of eyes are ogling him and failing to compute the logical answer.

“That’s not possible,” Amanda huffs, not really laughing but on the verge of it. Her face falls. “Wait, is it?”

Peggy rejoins the conversation, snapping back to focus where it had drifted. “What’s not possible?”

“Mo-om,” Amanda sing-songs, “Dad just said he’s Captain America.”

“Mm,” Peggy agrees, then frowns. “Steve, I thought we weren’t telling people that. Isn’t that bad for the future, or some such?”

If the kids looked shocked before, they’re floored now. Peggy has just confirmed something impossible, and, in their hearing, in the tone she has used for fond addresses all their lives, she has just called the father of her children by another man’s name. Or, rather, another name than the one they have ever heard her call the man in front of them.

Michael’s lower lip trembles. “Dad, what is going on?”

“My name,” Steve says, by way of explanation, “is Steven Grant Rogers. In another lifetime, some people knew me as Captain America. Whatever else I am or am not, I am still your father and I love you.”

***

2014 comes and goes. By then, the biggest challenge Steve has is missing himself at the hospital when he visits Peggy. His children must as well, by his own order, since he has no memories of meeting them. There is so little time left until time is no longer his pressing concern and guiding ethos.

He gives up on trying to track Bucky, though he knows better this time around than he did the last time he was in 2014 where his friend might go. He has followed Bucky his whole life. Peggy has only two years. He owes this to her.

Those last two years are so precious, and so, so difficult. The rest of 2016 passes by in a blur for Steve when he becomes a widower. Somewhere inside his own mind, he makes the connection between the reckless behavior of his younger self after this same event and the indifference with which he, at ninety-eight, goes to her funeral knowing full well that he and Sam Wilson will be there. Natasha is there, too, in the back, lingering. She does not pay him any mind; Odessa is many lifetimes ago for a spy with no covers left to hide behind. He is only a grieving old man, and she is here for the grieving young one.

Young Steve is enough of a bonehead in 2016 that he fails to properly grieve with the family despite making the request to help carry the casket alongside, unbeknownst to him, the son that is his age twice over again by this time. There are so many ways all of Steve’s efforts to preserve a timeline that is fast approaching its natural end could go wrong. Because he has, somehow, gotten it all right up until now, it doesn’t.

After the pressure to perform at the state funeral, Steve finds time for a celebration of Peggy’s life with his family. This time around, he gets to celebrate the life he had with Margaret Carter and mourn for it, not for the idea of what might have been. His children and grandchildren tell their favorite memories of Peggy. Only Sharon is missing, but, of course, she would be. The laughter and love is all that Steve takes with him from 2016. The rest is noise.

2017 passes much the same, but January 1, 2018 wakes Steve from a deep and terrible depression with an equally awful realization. This is it. This is the year of The Snap. The year for another meeting with the kids because he cannot let them go into it without hope. Even if they all survive, and with Steve’s luck and the general odds, that is a slim possibility, they need to be prepared for what comes after.

There are tears again, as there were in 2014. Callie holds his hand as he tells the story while Amanda and Barbara cling to Michael. He has always been so strong, and Steve tells him so.

“I’m not strong like you, Dad,” he says, shaking his head.

“You’re the strongest man I know. And they’re going to need you.” He squeezes Callie’s shoulder. “And you, kiddo. You signed on for this crazy ride.”

Callie snorts, wipes her runny nose. “We’ll be ready.”

No, she won’t, but Steve is still an optimist. He has five years left to be proven wrong.

***

He loses Michael in The Snap. He’s the only one, but that’s more than any of them can bear.

He moves in with Barbara the next day. Barbara has lost more—her parents, her sister-in-law, and her nephew all vanish. Her children are alive, but the youngest has lost the baby she was carrying at five months. Barbara wants answers to the unanswerable question of what happens in five years when The Snap is undone. Does Margaret, whom they all call Margie, still have a baby in five years? Does her first child become number two or three?

She looks to Steve for answers. He doesn’t have any except the one that has guided him for seventy years.

“Wait.”

***

Five years when one has lived for a hundred should pass more swiftly than they did when one was younger. They don’t.

He misses Michael with an ache, as do his grandkids. The first of what would be Michael’s great-grandchildren is born two years after he disappears into dust. Barbara and Steve cry happy tears on that day. Life goes on, and little Michael is proof. Little Michael’s mother, Veronica, doesn’t want to bother Steve with babysitting, but he volunteers every minute of every day that Barbara and Veronica will relinquish the baby to him. He repeats every story he told his son, tells him he loves him every hour, and tells him that he hopes his great-grandfather’s will be the first face he sees when The Snap is undone.

Barbara, Amanda, and Callie are the only other ones who know that this time of grief, though lasting in memory, is temporary. They keep it to themselves. These amazing women have become, like Steve, furtive, frightened and even jealous guardians of this secret. All he can think when he watches one of them struggle not to relieve someone else’s burden by giving them as-yet unrealized hope is that he should have told Peggy from the minute he stepped back into her life. The Carter women are exceptional human beings.

The night before the last stand of the Avengers under Steve Rogers’ command, Steve Rogers has a heart attack. Because he is too goddamned stubborn to die, he survives it, but he misses the day of The Second Snap unconscious in the hospital.

He wakes, five days later, to the sound of snores in the corner of his room. He cannot place it—none of his girls snore—so he turns his head, with difficulty.

His son has not been five years old in over half a century, but he still sleeps with on half of his mouth hanging open and drooling. It is absurd and Steve’s favorite memory. He watches Michael sleep and swears that he will die, if that is his fate, any time God or whoever is ready to take him, so long as he can see Michael wake and tell him he loves him one last time.

But, while he’s asking, he does have one other person he needs to see before he goes. Two, if he can be spared long enough.

***

Bucky always looked forward to the future, like any young man of ambition. If not for the war, he might have been a movie star, with his looks. He volunteered for the US Army because he thought that ambition might be realized there. Maybe the government pension could pay for school, help a nobody from Brooklyn go somewhere boys from Brooklyn never did.

Bucky always looked towards the future, so maybe that is why he is unfazed when Steve visits him two days before he takes the trip to the past to return the Infinity Stones and restore the timeline.

“You took the long way around,” Bucky drawls, rolling his eyes as he drops down beside Steve on his couch. “Why am I not surprised?”

In that moment, he sounds like the kid Steve knew and not the man who has seen more horrors than Steve had.

“I had a date,” Steve says, sheepish in front of the man who knew, all too intimately, the long history of failures making such a change in circumstance worth the risk.

“Must have been a crazy time.” Bucky smiles, only the corners of his lips tight with that deep melancholy that is as familiar as his smile.

“I’m sorry, Buck,” Steve says, meaning it, closing one hand over Bucky’s metal wrist. “I left you here, and, I’ll be honest, I didn’t regret it. I knew what I was getting in return, and I chose it over you. That was selfish of me.”

“Maybe,” Bucky shrugs. “Maybe I’m the one who was selfish to want you to stay.”

“You’re my friend,” Steve insists. “And you always will be. I owed you more than disappearing on you and not coming back.”

“You did come back,” Bucky says, shaking his head. “At least now I’ll be the one the girls all pay attention to again.” He glances at the ring on Steve’s left hand. “It was that woman in the red dress, wasn’t it?”

“Peggy,” Steve confirms.

Bucky whistles, appreciative. “I might have tossed you over for her, too, Steve.”

Steve can’t keep his grin on his lips at that. “I never tossed you over, Bucky. I left you here, but when I was back there, I never left you.”

Bucky’s nose wrinkles, trying to work out his meaning. Steve appreciates the difficulty. He’s been puzzling over the oddities of time travel for a lifetime, and he still hasn’t found the right metaphor for it. So he abandons metaphor.

“I was there, Buck. I was in Panama City. I was in Belize. In Cambodia. In Sri Lanka. In the Congo.”

He lists the names, and with each one Bucky draws further away from him, but he cannot escape Steve’s tight grasp on his wrist. Even as he moves into his second century, Steve is strong enough to keep Bucky where he wants him.

“Why,” Bucky mumbles, his gaze falling to his lap along with a few tears. “Why would you do that, Steve? Why did you want to see that?”

“I didn’t,” he says, releasing Bucky’s wrist to wipe at one droplet caught in Bucky’s stubble.

Bucky flinches, jumps at the touch. Even now, years after the Wakandans have helped him reconcile his memories and his traumas, he is unused to touch that is not intended to harm. So Steve does what Peggy would have done. He takes Bucky’s face in both his hands and turns him so he cannot look anywhere else.

“I didn’t want to see it. But I didn’t want you to be alone more.” Steve presses his thumb into Bucky’s chin. “I couldn’t undo what they did to you. But I could make it so you didn’t go through it alone. Not all the time.”

Bucky falls forward until their foreheads are touching.

“You’re my best friend,” Steve tells him, sighing where his friend’s breath hitches with sobs. “You deserved better and I couldn’t give it to you. But I could give you that. And you know what?”

Bucky shakes his head but does not speak.

“There are moments that were good. I remember all of them. Every time you had a moment’s peace before—before the inevitable.”

“I don’t remember those,” Bucky says, lowly.

“Would you like me to tell you?”

Bucky’s voice is a whisper. “Yes, please.”

It takes hours, and Steve’s voice is hoarse, but with every tale, with every minor victory over Hydra, even the ones that were met with failures shortly thereafter, Bucky relaxes a bit more and Steve reclaims parts of his soul. They take a break, here and there, for water, food, and the bathroom—Steve needing the latter more than Bucky, which prompts a round of teasing about his age that does not bother him.

They end the night as they lived in their youth, shoulder-to-shoulder, on Bucky’s bed. He lives in a small cabin on the Avengers property, far enough away from the others that Steve can trespass by staying the night and not be noticed. He might be eighteen again and laying on a rooftop, looking at the lights of the city with his best friend.

“What happens now?” Bucky asks, long after Steve has finished talking.

“Only good things,” Steve swears. “Whatever you want.”

They’re both ways of saying “I love you.” He hopes he has enough time left to show Bucky just how much.

**Author's Note:**

> 1) It bummed me out that so many people said that Steve was OOC in Endgame. I get that the movies previous to this have established that Steve is not the guy who can not act when people are in trouble. The thing is, though, Civil War made the effective argument that Steve following his gut was, ultimately, destructive—for him and everybody else. 
> 
> 2) Moreover, I believe that Steve knows this about himself by the time Endgame happens. The only way he can stop himself from getting into trouble is to be some place where his instinct to fight is balanced by an equally important pressure not to. Going into the past, where he cannot change anything lest he shoot off down an uncertain timeline, is the only way he would ever stop being so…him. It gives him a different struggle. As evidenced by the fact I wrote 10,000+ words about this in one sitting, I would watch a hundred movies about Steve fighting himself to not fuck up the future.
> 
> 3) The OOC claims are hyperbolic and often made at the expense of Peggy’s character. I have seen her referred to “some girl Steve knew for a few months” as if he didn’t spend years carrying around her picture and mourning her. Peggy might not be some people’s chosen pairing, but she is a very established love interest (who is also very interesting in her own right).
> 
> 4) That said, I totally get annoyance over a lack of Bucky in a movie that was so heavily focused on Steve. Give Steve and Bucky the battlefield reunion Tony and Peter got, or let Steve be seen to be talking with Bucky before Sam, even if we never heard what they’re saying. The Steve-Bucky friendship ride-or-die dynamic did deserve better.
> 
> 5) I think Bucky knew what Steve was up to at the end but Steve didn't. When Bucky says goodbye to Steve, Steve is teasing and flippant. But Bucky says, “I’m really going to miss you.” Either that’s OOC for a Steve who is planning to maybe never see Bucky again, or Bucky knows something Steve doesn’t. I feel it’s the latter, so that’s why I ended on it.
> 
> 6) At the same time, I got this horrible notion of Steve’s penance for abandoning Bucky being that he had to watch all the murders he committed. If Steve was going to be selfish and not save Bucky because of timey-wimey stuff, he would absolutely be a goddamned martyr about it.
> 
> 7) I ended it where it did because I’m not actually opposed to older!Steve and Bucky pairings, of friendly or romantic inclination. Steve is about 105, chronologically, as his birthday is in 1918. He’s probably more like 115 since he’s 27 when he “dies,” lives consecutive years from 2011 to 2023, and is 39 when he goes back to marry Peggy. I put him as arriving around 1947, at which time he is ten years older than he would have been had he lived straight through to that time. Either way, he doesn’t have many years left, but I absolutely believe he would spend them with Bucky.
> 
> 8) Having Steve arrive in 1947 messes up the Agent Carter timeline spectacularly. If I had to pick something to jettison to make the canon make sense, I picked the show versus the movies. One, Agent Carter’s timeline is all sorts of messed up thanks to the “Agent Carter” one-shot movie and the TV show not seeming to agree with the direction of her character (or timing or location). So that timeline is already wonky. 
> 
> 9) I am thinking of writing this as a series I have lots of ideas about how Steve would adjust to life back in the forties and what he would do on the micro-level since he knows he cannot alter things on the macro-level because Rules of Time Travel (that Marvel has just made up). I know what his career would be, for one. I want to show more of Steve as Dad and his constant thoughts of Tony at that time because there would be SO MANY. 
> 
> 10) Bucky and Sam’s adventures will continue in the Disney+ TV show, so I have fewer ideas for them and their hijinks. I’m absolutely convinced they call Steve once a week asking for help and Steve takes great delight in being their version of Jarvis. Or not! Maybe he yells at them for calling him all the time, and Jesus, I save the universe for you guys, can you not handle a few terrorists here and there?
> 
> 11) Snarky!Steve headcanon aside, it was hard to write him as keeping secrets from Peggy. My excuse was that if she knew about Hydra, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from changing things. Maybe it seems like a good idea to fight Hydra now, but if enough things change, would it be easier for Thanos to take over? Or for something worse and less reversible to happen?
> 
> 12) If my translation is correct, all Steve says to Natasha is “You’re welcome” and “Goodbye.” He would say more if it were safe to do so. That is another huge regret I had about Endgame. She was one of his best friends in the future, and he didn’t get to say goodbye to her. I have more I want to write about her in this universe, too.


End file.
